


Divine and Iron-Hearted

by anonymous_sibyl



Series: Mother of All Monsters [2]
Category: Cal Leandros - Rob Thurman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Gen, Genderbending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 09:11:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3129095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_sibyl/pseuds/anonymous_sibyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Echidna Leandros and George King</p>
            </blockquote>





	Divine and Iron-Hearted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tommygirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tommygirl/gifts).



> Written for [](http://tommygirl.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**tommygirl**](http://tommygirl.dreamwidth.org/) for [](http://fandom-stocking.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://fandom-stocking.dreamwidth.org/)**fandom_stocking** 2014\. Title comes from Hesiod's Theogony.
> 
> Disclaimer: This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/). None of the media or characters written about in my fanfiction belong to me and I make no profit from these works.

George is like the ice cream he encourages people to buy from the small-time shop where he spends most of his time reading the future for the people who need him most: Somewhat astounding but ultimately fragile and easy to destroy. If I said that out loud, Nik would huff out an amused “compared to you,” and probably begin an on-the-spot lesson about metaphors. 

I hate lessons. I love George.

I also love ice cream, which is how I know how helpless you feel while you watch your scoop slide off your cone and onto the dirty ground, knowing there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. A little kid in front of the shop is bawling over that very thing right now. If his parents don’t step up, I’m pretty sure George is going to send someone out there with a fresh cone. The thing is, even though a new cone is great it’s never the same as the original, now lying sullied in the gutter and melting away to nothingness.

“Mooning,” Nik says, accompanying that pearl of wisdom with a gentle smack to the side of my head. 

“Huh?” I slurp my drink and cock a grin at Nik. “Now you’re talking,” I say, lowering one hand to my fly and toying with my zipper. “Let’s get this party started.”

Nik rolls her eyes and looks like she wants to smack me again. “Keep your pants on, Chid. You’re a walking health violation and George won’t like it if you get this store shut down.” 

“But you said...” I put my best whine on that. Anything to distract Nik from the bee currently buzzing in her bonnet. 

She takes a tiny scoop of her sorbet and looks like she’s doing something Nik-like and strange to me like savoring it before speaking again. “Mooning. As in pining, yearning, carrying a torch.”

“Torches are impractical. Unless you want to set something on fire, then they're great,” I say. “Hey, we should set something on fire. We haven't done that in a while.”

Yeah, I’m an asshole. And Nik’s my long-suffering sister who puts up with all my crap because even though I’m half-monster she’s sure I can someday act like I'm all-human. I'm not so sure she’s right.

Nik opens her mouth like she’s going to lecture me, and I think about fires and marshmallows roasting over a fresh kill. That’s the difference between me and, well, everyone else. The monster that’s in half my DNA would love to torch this shop and everyone in it and roast things on sticks over the flames. Nik knows that. She just believes she can change it.

I'm saved by the psychic, because George calls across the shop to Nik, waving an ice cream cone in his hand and pointing out front toward the crying kid. Called it. Maybe I’m the psychic around here. But then George beckons to me, and I waste a few seconds looking behind myself, as if there had to be someone else he wanted to talk to. 

“No. You, dummy,” he calls out, and I can hear the smile in his voice. I could see the smile if I looked at him, but looking at George is something I try to avoid. Looking leads to feeling, feeling leads to acting, and acting leads to a ravening of Auphe invading the city and roasting things over George. 

I approach the table where he's seated like I'm approaching the Boggle: cautious with just a bit of swagger. “Georgie Porgy,” I say, clinging to that stupid nickname like it can keep me from thinking of George as anything more than a kid. 

“Kissed the girls and made them cry?” he asks, because he's a psychic smart-ass who likes to make me squirm.

“You know I never cry, Georgie,” I say with a wink. I have got to get some control here. What kind of monster am I if a pretty boy can make my heart beat out of my chest?

He pushes back his long, red hair, and brushes his fingers in the air over the back of my hand. I don’t flinch. I emphatically do not flinch because I kill monsters for a living and monster-hunters who are monsters themselves do not flinch. The Auphe would slaughter me where I sit and re-start their breeding program if they knew what a failure I am.

George taps the table, and from the way he's looking at me when I finally look up I figure it’s not the first time he’s tried to get my attention. 

“You’re pretty deep inside your own head today, Chid,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“You want me to...,” he trails off and gestures toward the air with his free hand. I’m pretty sure he thinks he’s correctly pantomiming reading the future but he looks like he’s scattering birdseed. 

“I don’t,” I say. “But Nik does.”

“Okay,” he says. “Does Nik need to be here for this? Or is this one of those things where she’s making you do something for your own good? Like the carrot thing?”

The carrot thing was when Nik decided I needed to eat more vegetables and less cows so I decided carrot cake was a vegetable. The end result was that for weeks baby carrots turned up in everything I ate, including ice cream. I would have tried the ketchup thing but Nik’s been wise to that since I was five. 

I shake my head. I can do this alone. All I have to do is ask George if anyone—or anything—knows where Nik and I are. And all I have to do to accomplish that is let George touch me. George the psychic. Who is going to scream the second he touches me and peeks into my monstrous mind. He’s going to see all my thoughts about blood and death, and all my fears of being the mother to a bunch of little Auphe monsters. And then he’s going to fear and hate me. And he'll be right to.

I can’t do it. “Carrot thing,” I say, lying to save my own ass. “Nik can handle this one on her own.” I stand up, take a few steps from the table, then look back at George. He’s looking at me like I'm something special, something he’s sad to see go. “Take care, Georgie Porgy.”

George’s goodbye, whatever it was, follows me out of the shop, as I dart past Nik and ice cream kid, and break into a run. I need to hunt and kill. I need prey to cringe before me in terror. I need to be recognized for the monster I am before I forget and start thinking of myself as a human, the kind of human who could be with George.

Just for now, for George’s sake, I need to be Auphe.


End file.
